When high school senior Ciarra Boyd recently persuaded her friend to not join the U.S. military, she got something she was not expecting: an irate call from her friend’s recruiter.

Boyd, who lives in the South Bronx and attends Urban Academy High School on Manhattan’s East Side, says she was deeply shaken by the experience.

“He [the recruiter] is yelling at me on the phone, ‘You need to mind your business. He’s a man, he can make his own decisions. You’re lucky I don’t know where you live,’” said Boyd, a member of the Ya-Ya Network, a student-driven organization involved in “counter-recruiting,” or stopping teens from joining the military.

New regulations by New York City Department of Education Chancellor Joel Klein announced earlier this year hope to monitor U.S. military recruiters who focus on courting high school students. Under the new rules, which take effect this semester, recruiters will be banned from using class time for presentations and all 9th to 12th grade students will be given forms to opt out of the provision in the No Child Left Behind Act, which automatically releases students’ contact information to recruiters.

“I don’t want to just be fed a whole bunch of lies and possibly die in Iraq,” said Tracy Hobbs, a Flatbush senior who attends Metropolitan High School in Brownsville. Hobbs is also a member of the Ya-Ya Network.

Also under the new mandate, each school must select a school official to coordinate these efforts. Schools will also be prohibited from automatically releasing test scores and contact information to the military for students who have taken the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery Test (ASVAB).

A report on student experiences with recruiters that was released by the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU) and Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer in 2007 charges that the city’s Department of Education (DOE) has failed to protect students’ rights.

Of the 1,000 students surveyed in the report, 40 percent did not receive opt-out forms at the beginning of the school year, and 45 percent were unfamiliar with the procedure for reporting recruiter misconduct.

While optimistic, many advocates are concerned about how the rules will be implemented. Ya-Ya Network Executive Director Amy Wagner says enforcing the new regulations will be difficult if students, parents and teachers are not aware of them.

There has been so little press coverage of the new rules that when The Indypendent contacted two different military recruiter spokespeople, it appeared neither knew the regulations existed.

While this policy change is the result of six years of lobbying efforts by the NYCLU, the Students or Soldiers? Coalition and other community groups, many still worry that these changes will be inadequate to prevent teens from enlisting.

Advocates are concerned that the rules will not affect how the military disproportionally targets poorer and minority communities. According to the American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker social justice organization, lower-income neighborhoods, such as the South Bronx, East New York and Flatbush, have higher rates of military recruitment, while more affluent areas have lower rates.

While recruiting rates had dropped in recent years, the economic recession, however, has forced many people, like Dan Brown, to reconsider enlisting. Brown said he enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps at the Brooklyn Heights recruiting station in mid-September after looking for a job for five months. In the first six months of 2009, the military reported that it exceeded its active duty recruitment goals by 5 percent.

According to the progressive think tank National Priorities Project, in 2008 52 percent of U.S. Army recruits were under the age of 21, and 82 percent were 24 and under. The Army accounts for nearly half of total recruiting numbers.

While the new rules will make it more difficult for the military to contact students, the military collects information in many other ways, including data mining, online career tests, video games and marketing software.

With more than 260,000 high school students, New York City is the largest school district in the country. Advocates hope that Klein’s regulations will serve as an example for others districts and they plan to hold DOE accountable. Currently only a handful of other cities, including Los Angeles and Portland,Ore., limit recruitment efforts in schools.

Advocates are concerned over the absence of a provision that would allow students to report problems they may have with recruiters. "This policy fails to set out a clear, definite grievance procedure where if students have a problem, where to go, how to deal with it, " said Ari Rosmarin, the NYCLU’s senior advocacy coordinator who has worked on the campaign to create the guidelines for the past five years.

“Advocates, community members, students, we are all looking this year to see if the DOE is actually going to live up to its word and implement this policy,” Rosmarin added.

Comments

Good to see this is finally changing. Recruiter pushiness was really starting to be a problem in the early 90s when I left high school - recruiters would constantly call and some would even make personal visits to my home, despite my "There's nothing you can do to make me even consider you" attitude. The military is a good choice for some, but not me.

It took breaking an ankle and having a dozen screws put in it to make them stop. I still remember the look of horrified disappointment from the Air Force recruiter as his top candidate (had the highest ASVAB score out of my school) evaporated with the cast on my leg.

I do highly recommend that anyone being solicited by a recruiter pay attention to what they say and how they say it. You'll find this invaluable in your professional careers - it will give you one up on the tactics that invade all job interviews with recruiters (of any sort!)

We are getting reports from students in schools all over the city that their schools are telling them that only parents can sign opt out forms. It has been Dept of Ed policy for more than 6 years for students to sign for themselves, and now the Chancellor's Regulation requires this. Yet many schools are STILL getting this wrong. Of course this is not made any clearer by the fact that the "Blue Book" of Students' Rights and Responsibilities incorrectly states that parents must sign.

In addition, students from several schools have reported that they "never heard of opt out."

Clearly, the methods the DoE has been using to inform schools about the regulation are not working. We can only assume that if schools are getting this wrong that they aren't enforcing the other aspects of the regulation either.

If you hear of any instances of schools not implementing the Chancellor's Reg, PLEASE contact us at info@yayanetwork.org AND report it to the DoE (Lilian Garelick, Office of School and Youth Development, Director of Mandated Responsibilities-lgareli@schools.nyc.gov, 212-374-6095). The folks there think that these are isolated incidents. We need to demonstrate that the problem is systemic.

The government has gotten a bit clever on figuring out a way to maintain a high count of cannon fodder by:

1. screwing up the economy,
2. over-regulating the labor market, making it very difficult to hire people who have minimal productivity and experience,
3. government-run education replaces critical thinking with patriotism, nationalism and blind obedience to the state,
4. making immigration very difficult, allowing for coaxing prospective recruits in exchange for
5. and finally, an organization that has a bottomless pit of financial resources from the printing press, taxation, property confiscation, looting and more, and is applied to recruiting by shining pamphlets.

The solution can only be of the abolition of the government -- that is, a complete free market economy without the federal, state, county and local governments interfering with the lives of others.

If you don't want to join the military, then don't. Mind your own business. If you've never been in, you don't know Jack. Hate the government, hate the president, have your own opinions, that's what we Soldiers, Marines, Airman and Sailors are fighting for. Your right to voice your own opinion, even if it is stupid. But if you haven't served, please don't bad mouth the military. I will never go to your work and bad mouth your job, no matter what it is. Especially, if I've never walked in your shoes. If you're in the military and don't like it, get out. Or you can be one of the 65% who do like it and want to re-enlist. The job stability is great and I don't have to flip burgers anymore and wonder how I'm going to provide for my family. I learned a long time ago to never believe what you hear and only half of what you see. Had I listened to all the negative feedback about the military 23 years ago, I wouldn't be where I am today making 75k per year and can retire when I’m ready. But go ahead and make your silly comments that you have no clue about. It's your right as an American. And if you don't like being an American, you can get out of that too. Trust me, you won't be missed.